July 17–24, 1997

food|CP Food Summer '97

Passion Fruit

By Janet Ruth Falon

Julia Lehman/City Paper

I ate a Big Boy last night.

It was amazing, so sweet and so tender. I just couldn't get enough. Toward the end, juices just spurted from my mouth and ran down my throat in little rivulets. Oh, baby! And in the middle of it I remembered that it means "swollen thing" in Nahuatl, the Aztec language, and how fitting that is.

No, you didn't wander into Ask Isadora. We're talking tomatoes, folks. Get a grip.

Tomatoes. This is the time of year when you can buy one in the supermarket and not worry that it'll taste like frozen cardboard. But you can trust supermarket tomatoes for only about one and a half months, according to Trish Morrissey, chef at our own Ritz-Carlton, who is using tomatoes — at least five varieties — in all four courses of a dinner (including dessert) entitled "Fruit of Passion: The Tomato" later this month. "Use tomatoes in season and you can't go wrong," she says. If you want a reliably superior tomato out of season, one with vine-ripened flavor that's less than rock hard, get ready to fork over as much as $3 per fruit.

Right about now is also when home tomato-growers start to eat one tomato — or more — each day; my friend Joe, who's coaxed willing tomatoes from the ground for more than a decade, is happy to eat his tomatoes at all three meals, including at breakfast, with just some cheese and bread.

Then, as the ripening pace of the little suckers increases, the proud gardeners begin to share their crimson bounty with friends and neighbors — and, depending on the yield, with the mail carrier, the local dry cleaner, the PECO fix-it man who shows up around lunchtime, the kid who's selling candy for a scout troop, you name it, anybody. (Getting rid of zucchini is almost as bad.)

Tomatoes. The most misunderstood fruit — yes, not a vegetable but a fruit, packed with vitamins A and C — of all. According to George Ball, president and CEO of W. Atlee Burpee & Company in Warminster, the federal government once determined that anything that appeared in a soup was a vegetable (obviously, this classification occurred before the days of cold cherry soups and the like). Maybe that's the reason Ronald Reagan thought he could pass off tomato ketchup as a vegetable portion to undernourished schoolkids.

A fresh-picked, homegrown tomato can make even the most articulate people speak in tongues. My husband, for instance, who tends our tomatoes in the backyard and is now — hallelujah! — a believer, says, "There's a taste of tomato in supermarket tomatoes that makes you think that's how tomatoes taste until you taste a real one."

As a child, I never liked the tomatoes my parents bought, year-round, which were tasteless, pale and had a texture that was a revolting mixture of gooshy, tough and plastic. And who knew, back then, that tomatoes weren't supposed to be refrigerated? I loved tomato sauce and juice, and would tolerate a slice or two in a BLT or grilled cheese sandwich, but I would always pluck the tomatoes out of my salads and sneak them onto my father's plate.

Happily, things have changed since then. Now there are several hundred varieties of tomatoes, which vary in size, shape, color, flavor and relative amount of acidity.

Of those, Burpee sells 30 to 35 varieties of tomato seeds each year. "There are a lot of variations on a theme," says Ball, adding that the objective of home gardeners is to grow tomatoes that are early, delicious and high-yielding. Joe the gardener says he's happy to eat a good tomato right off the vine, chomping on it like an apple; this year he's growing Early Girls and Better Boys, both of which he says are better than Big Boys.

So tell me one thing: if tomatoes have come such a long way, why in heck are their stupid names still gendered? Big Boy. Early Girl. Better Boy. Big Girl. Etc. It's the end of the '90s, for goodness' sake. It's as dumb as gendering hurricanes or cars. Ball explains that the tomato varieties' names are the same type as the names of farm animals, where "'big' for a farm animal is a big deal." Fine. OK. But in this day and age I'd rather eat a Supersteak tomato than an Early Girl — and speaking as a vegetarian, that's saying a lot.

The differences in tomatoes are sufficiently great as to evoke passionate reactions. "Some people can't stand the Brandywine variety," says Ball, who eats at least three tomatoes a week, and really "chows them down" in season. "They say it's too punky, that it has an overripe taste, and it gags them."

But someone with that discerning a palate is, actually, an ideal customer, someone who wouldn't put salt or sugar on a raw tomato. Ball is especially fond of people who understand that technically, it's the rotting of the tomato that elevates it, "sort of like 'the noble rot' of wine grapes," he says.

And then there are the masses "who buy tomatoes for color in their salads, not because they like the flavor," says Ball. "There aren't too many red things you can put in a salad." Red peppers are expensive. Radishes are too bitter for those of us with sensitive tastebuds. Tomatoes break up a salad's sea of green but, for the sake of color, most of the year you'll have to put up with what Ball calls "that state of insipidness."

He says that it's the consumer's fault if supermarkets get away with selling lousy tomatoes. "If people are willing to buy them, there'll be people who are going to sell them," says Ball.

The "Fruit of Passion: The Tomato" dinner, at the Ritz-Carlton, will be on Wednesday, July 30, with hors d'oeuvres beginning at 6:30 p.m, at $55 per person, plus tax and tip. To make a reservation, call 563-1600, ext. 450